Stop letting nuclear fund go to waste

By WILLIAM H. MILLER

Sunday

Oct 31, 2010 at 12:01 AMOct 31, 2010 at 7:00 AM

Since its creation in 1982, the government’s Nuclear Waste Fund has accumulated more than $30 billion in fees and interest from users of nuclear-generated electricity. Of that total, $206 million has come from Missouri.

Yet electricity consumers are getting little, if anything, in return. The money was supposed to pay for construction of a deep-geologic repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada to hold high-level radioactive waste from nuclear power plants. But earlier this year President Barack Obama terminated the project at the encouragement of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a senator from Nevada.

Ratepayers, however, continue to be assessed a fee of one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour, and the money keeps flowing into the waste fund at a rate of more than $200 million a year. Instead of going toward nuclear waste management, a large share of the money has been diverted into the U.S. general fund to pay for other federal programs.

The result is that about 63,000 metric tons of nuclear waste is still being stored at nuclear plant sites, even though the landmark 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act directed the federal government to begin taking possession of the waste no later than 1998. About 610 tons is stored at the Callaway Nuclear Plant.

Although the waste is kept in engineered water pools and concrete-and-steel dry casks and could probably remain where it is in safe storage for another 300 years, nuclear plants were designed to generate electricity, not become de facto waste repositories. Why this isn’t understood by Washington policymakers is hard to say.

America’s energy security is at stake. The continuing political deadlock over nuclear waste is hampering efforts to build new nuclear plants. In fact, 12 states have laws banning new nuclear plants until the waste issue is resolved.

To correct this, Congress must establish a quasi-government organization to manage the nation’s used fuel. This would provide certainty of funding, continuity of leadership and insulation from changes in political policy. Such an organization would have full access to the Nuclear Waste Fund outside of congressional appropriations, with the ability to adjust the fees as necessary.

Because managing used fuel is a very long endeavor, we need centralized interim storage facilities to hold the material. Such storage would provide the time needed to develop an advanced technology for used-fuel recycling — also known as reprocessing — and complete the Yucca Mountain repository for the nuclear waste that cannot be recycled.

With recycling, valuable materials in the used fuel now stored at nuclear plants can be chemically extracted and turned into fuel for use in reactors to produce more electricity. And the much smaller amount of material to be stored in a waste disposal site after reprocessing is radioactive for less than 1,000 years, rather than tens of thousands of years without reprocessing. New technology is being developed to make the recycling process safer and more efficient.

This policy change would be in keeping with President Obama’s support of nuclear power. He has called for developing a “new generation of nuclear reactors,” appointed a commission to make recommendations about used fuel, including recycling, and supported increased loan guarantees for construction of nuclear power plants.

The National Academy of Sciences recently cited the importance of renewable energy sources and nuclear power in mitigating greenhouse emissions. But the reality is that solar, wind and geothermal sources provide only a small fraction of the nation’s electricity — less than 5 percent of the total supply. To meet a projected 21 percent growth in demand for electric power by 2030 and replace aging fossil-fuel plants, nuclear power, combined with wind and solar, will be needed to play a larger role in our economic and environmental well-being.

So let’s break this political impasse over nuclear waste. Let’s move ahead with the creation of an organization to manage used fuel and development of an interim national storage facility. At the very least, this would ensure ratepayers are getting something worthwhile in return for their contributions to the Nuclear Waste Fund.

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